


nice things are for nice girls

by rudderless in an ocean of stars (indelibly_ellie)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/M, Feels, Red Room (Marvel), mentions of past violence, natasha has a level 10 tragic backstory, natasha has trouble admitting her feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-27
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-12-07 13:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11624367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indelibly_ellie/pseuds/rudderless%20in%20an%20ocean%20of%20stars
Summary: "Natasha remembers the first time she saw Captain America.It wasn’t during their meeting on the Helicarrier, or when he got himself lost in Times Square, or when S.H.I.E.L.D. dug his body out of the ice.No, the first time Agent Romanoff sees Captain America, she is not yet Natasha."In which Natasha longs for something she'll  never let herself have.(Even if she knows he wants her too.)





	nice things are for nice girls

Natasha remembers the first time she saw Captain America.

 

It wasn’t during their meeting on the Helicarrier, or when he got himself lost in Times Square, or when S.H.I.E.L.D. dug his body out of the ice.

 

No, the first time Agent Romanoff sees Captain America, she is not yet Natasha.

She is Natalia Alianovna Romanova, one of the twenty-eight students of the Red Room’s Black Widow Program, training to live a life in service to her country.

It is the early days of training, and all twenty-eight of the original girls recruited to the program are still alive.

Natalia herself has yet to take a life.

Their teachers show them films reels of America’s propaganda-toy-turned-hero, the so-called ‘Star Spangled Man With A Plan.’

Natalia thinks that his costume is overly conspicuous, and wonders if that’s what had gotten him killed. (The teachers are reluctant to admit the details of his demise, given the fact that the Tesseract had been lost alongside America’s golden boy.)

She quietly vows to wear something much more subtle when she graduates.

She overhears a couple of her peers discussing his good looks, and privately, she agrees. Even teary-eyed from the smoke and covered in soot as he emerges from the smoking ruins of yet another destroyed H.Y.D.R.A. facility, there is a charm to him, an indelible aura of good that Natalia simultaneously abhors and clings to, preserving every detail of the grainy film in her mind.

Unlike her peers, however, she is not stupid enough to give voice to such treasonous, dangerous thoughts about a member of the enemy they are training to fight.

The two spiderlings are gone the next morning, and once again, Natalia pulls her silence around her like a shield.

(It is not made of vibranium, but it protects her just the same.)

Only one ever returns, but it’s clear that whatever adjustments they’d needed to make to her brain have left her irrevocably damaged.

She washes out a month later, neck snapped by Yelena on the training mats, and Natalia doesn’t flinch at the sound that echoes around the room, the sound of her vertebrae giving out beneath the other girl’s ruthless strength.

Three girls make the mistake that Natalia does not, and two of them are visibly limping during training the next day. The third has bruises on her knuckles and looks considerably worse than the others.

Natalia knows not to fight back, they all do, but it seems as if this girl has decided to ignore all sense of reason.

She is killed two weeks later, and Natalia is the one whose kick caves in her chest.

* * *

Seventy years trapped in the Arctic have done little to diminish his looks, but the innocent boyishness Natasha still so vividly recalls from her days in the Red Room is gone, replaced with grim half-smiles that never really reach his eyes.

His features are sharper now, worn by pain, if not by time.

His overall demeanor is no less heroic, but far less light-hearted.

This ice may have kept him from aging- the serum, too, given the fact that Natasha still doesn’t look a day over twenty-something- but it hasn’t kept him from changing.

Natasha doesn’t think she’s ever seen smile as brightly in this day and age as he did in black-and-white beside the Howling Commandos.

She tries her best to coax him into the 21st century, makes lists of things for him to try and pushes him towards girls who are safe and sweet and everything that Natasha _isn’t_.

Now, standing across from him beside the false grave of the man currently slinking away into the shadows, holding a file she’d had to pull favors she probably should have kept in reserve just to obtain, she can’t help but feel as though she’s failed.

For all her efforts to ground him in the present, he’s now asking her to help him chase the ghosts of a past that she’s far from ready to face, even if her lurid history has already been plastered across the internet for all to see.

She’s just glad that Fury had thought to keep her real date of birth off of the official files. It keeps quite a bit of her laundry list of sins quiet, along with the fact that a variation of the serum currently coursing through Steve’s veins also flows through her own.

(And if it keeps the whole truth from the man standing in front of her for just a little bit longer, well, Natasha’s never claimed to be selfless.)

Still, she hands it to him with a smile that she’s had years of practice to perfect.

She makes one, last-ditch attempt to pull him out of the past.

“Will you do me a favor? Call that nurse?”

“She’s not a nurse.”

“And you’re not a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent,” she retorts, well-versed in the flow of their verbal sparring, and he finally concedes.

“What was her name again?”

“Sharon,” she says, ignoring the warring waves of relief and bitter disappointment threatening to pull her down and break her body against the sharp rocks of the stormy sea raging within her chest. “She’s nice.”

( _Nice_ , the way Natasha will _never_ be.)

The brief silence between them is strained in a way that it hasn’t been since the start of their partnership all those months ago.

In the end, she looks away first, unable to bear the weight of his gaze, heavier now than it’s ever been before, loaded with all the things that they both know she’d never let him say, all the things she’d run from if he ever voiced them aloud.

Nice things are for nice girls, and Natasha Romanoff hasn’t been nice since the day of the fire that had left her an orphan.

She steps forward, presses a kiss to his cheek and pulls away before he can so much as blink, his hand sliding off of her waist in an echo of the embrace she knows he longs to give.

She walks away, and he doesn’t stop her- he knows he could, they both do, and it’s just as dangerous as all the things Natasha has spent her life trying to avoid.

The look in his eyes that she doesn’t turn away quickly enough to avoid is almost enough to make her change her mind.

 _Almost_.

She settles for a last warning tossed over her shoulder, and fills it with the concern she tries so hard not to feel, because he is not hers to care about.

 _Love is for children_ , she reminds herself, but it’s not enough and she knows it from the way her stupid, stubborn heart continues to ache in her chest as she moves to leave.

“Be careful, Steve. Might not want to pull on that thread.”

Then she’s gone, another ghost in a field of graves.

She doesn’t allow herself to look back.

**Author's Note:**

> Like it? Love it?
> 
> Let me know.
> 
> Find me on Tumblr: @rudderless-in-an-ocean-of-stars.


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